15 really useful responsive web design tutorials

Responsive web design is now easier than ever to implement, as there are so many great tools to help you create and test your designs. Here’s our roundup of some of the best resources that will guide you in making your websites work well and look great on any device.

Forms are one of the most important elements in any digital product design, and whether you need a signup flow or a multi-view stepper, you need to design it so that’ll work effectively on mobile devices just as well as on the desktop. Here’s how to do it, complete with helpful tips on how to use Flexbox.

CSS Grid Layout is growing in browser support every day, and while it’s not a replacement for Flexbox or even for floats, when used in combination with them it’s a great way to create new and exciting responsive layouts. Follow this step-by-step guide to building a responsive portfolio site using Grid.

Time for a video tutorial, and this one is from a talk by Matt D Smith at our Generate New York event from April 2016. In it, Smith discusses what it takes to handle both the pixels and the people really well when creating a responsive build as part of a team. He walks through a systematic, designer-focused process that will make your next responsive project a success.

Have you started using Flexbox yet? In this tutorial Wes Bos provides a comprehensive guide to the core concepts that will give you a solid understanding of everything you need to get to grips with this powerful tool.

This complete guide to Flexbox is written by Sara Soueidan, an author who is renowned for her ability to explain concepts in a way that’s easy to follow without scrimping on detail. The Codrops guide is regularly updated so it’s a great resource to return to when you need it.

Stacks, part of the Auto Layout plugin, provide a way for you to use Flexbox technology within Sketch, without using CSS. This article explains how you can make use of this powerful technique for easy responsive design.

If you don’t want to use a framework to build your responsive site, these Sass extensions are a nice alternative, each with their own strengths. They’ll take care of the responsive maths for you so you can focus on design.

This isn’t a tutorial per se, but there’s a lot of learning here. In this post, the first of a two-part series, frontend developer Shaun Bent takes us on a detailed tour of how CSS is done at BBC Sport. They’ve managed to keep the CSS foundation of this massive site under 9kb, and it’s fascinating to see how that’s been done.

Sticky footer… that should be simple enough, right? Unfortunately not. It can be trickier than you might expect to get that footer in the right place on every device. Luckily Chris Coyier has put together five tricks that will help you to make it happen using calc(), Flexbox, negative margins and Grid.

Make sure your responsive site can accept input from any kind of device

Responsive design isn’t just about making your page display properly on any device, you also have to make it function well – and that means it has to be good at accepting input in a world where desktops have touchscreens and phones have keyboards. This article by Jason Grigsby of Cloud Four has some sound advice.

Applied without consideration, certain best practices that were conceived during the desktop era may have a detrimental effect on mobile web performance. This article will make you think more deeply about how you get your site to work well on mobile.